Whether we realize it or not, the two greatest influences on behavior are Who we think we are, and How we think we fit into the world. It has a massive impact on how we behave.

One of the reasons people perceive credentials as valuable is that they impart a sense of identity: “Who I am.”

Have you ever noticed how people who have attended top business schools describe themselves: “I’m a Harvard MBA” or “I’m a Stanford MBA.” It’s not a statement of skill – it’s a statement of identity.

Getting the certificate is a confirmation of group identity, which has a powerful influence on behavior. Enroll in business school, and you “become” an MBA.

What I do (what I have done for over 7 years on the Internet) is what I would call self-education. But self education has always lacked that strong sense of identity. No one (including me) says “I’m a self-educator.”

You’re also a “Self-Educator,” aren’t you?

Today I’m going to talk about something myself and the 80/20 Marketing Team have been working on for a couple months now.

This will be a project that culminates much of what I’ve learned over the last 20 years with regard to self-education. My hope is that if you’re a little earlier on this path, you can avoid some pitfalls I’ve stepped in.

We’re calling it The Leaders’ Circle

Our focus with The Leaders’ Circle is specifically on online business – how to create and run a successful online business – but the philosophy and process also applies to the process of self-educating ourselves more generally in business and pretty much anything else.

You see, self-education is not who we are. It’s what we do in the pursuit of something. That’s far more important in my mind. The act of self-education is a means to an end, not an end itself.

Let me provide a quick example using the 80/20 rule.

You will make more money, generate more leads, sign up more reps and customers when you become freakishly good at the fundamentals.

That’s one of the reasons I named our company 80/20 Marketing. Because of the 80/20 rule. We’ve observed that, in variety of circumstances, 80% of our output comes from 20% of our input.

This means that 20% of the time you spend behind your computer provides 80% of your best work.

Just like 20% of that wonderful meal my husband Brian prepared last night provided 80% of the pleasure. (But really! I need to lay off the chocolate cake)

There’s always a “20%” you should be spending your time on. And no matter the discipline, it’s always the fundamentals.

The Leaders’ Circle is going to help you with the 20% that provides 80% of the return. And that’s 100% grounded in the fundamentals .

Answer honestly…

Have you been racing through the fundamentals so you can get to “fun stuff?”

Are you spending too much time on the esoteric, “advanced” material?

Real masters are amazing at the fundamentals. If you think the fundamentals of online business are boring, you’ll never master them.

As a self-educator, it’s about the joy of developing yourself and mastering these fundamental online business skills. That’s the philosophy and process that applies to living a productive and satisfying life.

Are you also improving the quality of your life as you pursue a successful online business?

That’s an important goal for The Leaders’ Circle. We will master the fundamentals and improve the quality of your life as you pursue a successful online business.

Our first small step to reach this goal has been accomplished.

We created this blog, and we’ve created The Leaders’ Circle Facebook page. These will be “environments” where we provide you a support structure for you to practice with other self-educators on the 20% that matters most.

Our goal is to help develop, create and nurture hot beds of talent, and also partner with other communities that are fostering hot beds of talent.

The emphasis will be placed on what you do when you do it. We’re going to provide feedback on the action you take.

We’re using “The Talent Code,” a book written by Daniel Coyle to ignite The Leaders’ Circle

The Leaders’ Circle will be a place of ignition.

For example, when I saw Nadia Comencia in the 1976 Olympics, I thought to myself, “I want to be like Nadia!”

Off I ran in hot pursuit which led to down loads of deep practice. She was the first to ignite my inspiration to perform and coach gymnastics.

Seeing me and my results inspired her to do the same. She’s since gone on to do amazing things as a Sales Expert, Online Marketer, and Trainer for Business Entrepreneurs.

This is exactly what Daniel Coyle wrote about in his book, and spoke upon during our first Leaders’ Circle webinar, which we hosted with him as our guest last week.

The intention is for The Leaders’ Circle to be your “playing field” to ignite action and practice. We believe it’s this deep practice — along with the kind of master coaching which involves rapid feedback — that greatly shortens the learning curve for how to create and run a successful online business.

No matter what I’ve done, whether as a gymnastics coach, a homeschool mom or as the Leader of our 80/20 Marketing team, I’ve applied this ignition, deep practice, master coaching model that Daniel Coyle so eloquently describes in The Talent Code.

This is the ever-evolving face of self-education.

Our goal will be to create leaders, partnerships and potential joint ventures with you. This is why we’ve decided to form a “The Leadership Circle,” a leadership culture where you will be challenged to stretch yourself and grow.

What Does The Leaders’ Circle Mean For You?

It means we are providing you with a public place to take action; a place to demonstrate “deep practice” for which you will receive rapid feedback within a supportive community.

The part of Leaders’ Circle that we’re introducing today costs no money. But even an education that’s completely free is expensive in time and effort.

Most of us who run online businesses self-educate in similar ways. We find the best free stuff then we might pay for a course or an ebook.

In the end, we try to pull it together. A lot simply comes from pure observation. We’ll be talking more about that in the weeks and months ahead. For now, watch this video I put together about The Leaders’ Circle.

Watch this short video that describes The Leaders’ Circle

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Does the premise behind The Leaders’ Circle make sense to you? Do you have a better understanding for why we are forming The Leaders’ Circle? Be sure to comment about that once you finish reading here.

More than anything, today I want you to realize that the new world of self-education has placed new demands on all who are committed to teach.

Remember one of the main lessons from The Renegade Network Marketer, “Teaching sells.” We’re all teachers.

The best combination of freedom, money, meaning and value will be given to teachers because they take the complexity of change, and communicate that into concrete action for you to thrive. And it’s this act of teaching that will raise our own value, and the value of everyone participating around us.

Your authority and credibility no longer depend on credentials — they depend on mastering fundamental skills by practicing them in the real world. And that is exactly what The Leaders’ Circle is intended to support you with.

Now, I’ll leave you with a prompt to take one simple action.

I’d like for you to leave a comment with any of your thoughts. In particular, considering these questions:

Is The Leaders’ Circle starting to make sense to you? Do you have a better understanding for why we are forming The Leaders’ Circle?

What do we need to teach ourselves and how can technology support that?

Have you thought deeply about the way you attend to your self-education?

If this post was of value to you, share it with others. [serialposts2]

About Ann Sieg

Ann Sieg is the CEO of 80/20 Marketing, Inc. She's the author of The Renegade Network Marketer, The 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing & The Attraction Marketer's Manifesto.
I'm inviting you to connect with me. I love feedback. All of it. So let's have an intelligent helpful conversation to help you become more profitable in your business. Leave a comment below.

Comments

I’m so happy that the first statement was “Struggle is Not An Option.” Learning all there is to know about online marketing is a struggle, albeit an enjoyable one. Yes practice Yes repetition Yes patterning after other leaders. I do feel as if I am stretching my brain daily. I look forward to sharing ideas and getting good honest experienced feedback, and giving it in return.

Happy to Be Here and look forward to all the challenges – for me that is a necessary part of my growth and development. Thank you for the opportunity!

Thank you Ann. It is clear from reading The Talent Code that feedback is critical in skill acquisition. In thinking about my recent efforts to acquire new skills, I realized that this piece was missing from my resource map. And here it is! Now I understand exactly what you are doing with The Leader’s Circle. You are giving us the opportunity to get feedback from like-minded people. I would like to better understand how you see this as working. For example, someone posted her blog link on the LC face book page and because our interests overlap I went and read all the blog content. I wanted to share my impressions with her but did not know how to go about doing so. I find that the face book character limits keep me from saying what I really want to say, and I did not know if she would prefer to receive my feedback in a more private channel rather than posted for all to see. So although I was willing and able to help her with feedback, I did not know what to do and so did nothing. On a more personal note, I need to get myself a domain name and post content for my own teaching efforts, and it would be wonderful to be able to ask the community for feedback as I go down this path. I am self-motivating and disciplined about my efforts to learn what I need to learn to be effective, but I am going to want and need feedback that my existing friends are not necessarily in the best position to give me. Do you have a clear sense about how our community is going to function, or is this a topic about which community discourse is needed?

I had a major light-bulb moment reading the book this week about the hotbed. I’ve been part of a hotbed and didn’t realize that is what it was! It’s a private facebook group, a tribe so to speak, of bloggers who are critiquing, supporting, encouraging, and collaborating to help each other improve.

I am so grateful you’re creating this group here, so we can all work together and help each other get results! I’m loving the book and excited for all you’re unveiling to us these past couple of weeks.

I feel like you’ve given me a formula for growth and learning that was always there, but I was never conscious of.

I believe we need to teach ourselves how to work efficiently together, getting to know each other, understanding each other’s goals so we can critique each other and push each other to learn and grow.

I see the wisdom of launching the Leadership Circle with a presentation on “The Talent Circle”. I love the imagery of it being a “hotbed for leadership development” and I love the way you are beginning to flesh it out. I believe it’s in community that we grow best and at the same time find it hard to get used to the introvert that I am. I appreciate, Ann, your commitment to moving us out in taking creative action and supporting eachother as we take risks. Thanks.

As far as posting comments to people you kind of have to feel it out. Some times you run out of space so you have to trim it down as best you can. You can also private message people through FB and I know there is substantially more space provided to leave a comment for them. I use it quite often.

My hunch is if you’re inclined to reach out to someone go with the flow of it. That’s part of the stretching growing part of social media. On the order of what’s talked about in The Talent Code. We’ve got to be working on the edge of our discomfort. Not all the time, of course. But definitely when we feel any sense of timidity creeping in. That’s almost the sure signal we should go ahead. Growth is sure to be right behind the corner if you do.

As far as getting a domain name and beginning to post your own content I strongly recommend the superior blogging training put together by my content partner Ty Tribble. He is a very highly regarded and respected MLM Blogger. You can access his product at this link. https://www.mlmblogsecrets.com/

You need to know you will be offered his second training product called MLM Blog Code. If you are serious about moving your business forward (like Heather Stephens in this same thread) I recommend you purchase that as well.

Heather went through both of these programs and is a star student of Ty’s material. She’s become a leader in short order because of her creativity and ability to be consistent with her blogging.

David Langford, also in this thread has gone through our training material. Great people to help you along with Holli Rovenger. (Welcome Holli!)

If you have any questions about this feel free to ask in this thread. My team is here to help you as well!

We’re pleased to have you as a part of our community.

BTW, Blaine Glynn will be posting a gravatar training video for you as well. That way you can have your picture on the blog as well

Yes, Alice, the MLM Blog Secrets and MLM Blog Code programs were the turning point for me that brought all I’d been learning together. It was very easy to follow and I made a commitment that I would implement everything before I went onto the next module. In a matter of weeks I had a fully functional, beautiful blog, that was starting to attract attention. Since then, networking with other bloggers, and continuing my learning, step by step has really helped me to put my blog on the map.

I would be happy to answer any questions you have about the programs or offer you help if you get stuck somewhere. Ann’s support system is incredible as well, and they were very helpful to me. All in all, you can’t go wrong with the program, if you implement what you learn from it!

This is a phenomenal idea. Thank you. The timing couldn’t have been better for me as I’ve recently began writing my first book about healing/recovery. I am also spending as much time as I can – (typically 2-3 hours a day) on developing a blog in the hope of raising awareness about mental health and ending stigma.

I too believe in self education. I have a Nursing degree and that has served me well, but I know what is going to create my ultimate financial freedom is self education. I have been involved in self education since a very young age. I love learning and I love books.

As far as role models/mentors and belonging to a team – I have never found anything close to what I had with the you and the Worksteam. Working with you and the Worksteam was an awesome experience. Now I have another opportunity to work with you and the team again. I’m grateful that you’ve created the Leader’s Circle.

I must say that you are a great role model. You are an example of an intelligent, independent, beautiful and successful woman. You inspire me to be all I can be. I know if you can do it, there is great hope and unlimited possibilities for me as well.

The program is in Beta right now with the paid version being developed for future release. We wanted as many people as possible to get involved on the public side because there are so many benefits to doing so.

We’ve covered a bit of those in the three blogs post and there’s more coming today.

If you’re able to we’d love to see you participate in January’s Leaders’ Circle Challenge. I realize it’s a bit late to join in on it but I wouldn’t have people do a challenge that wouldn’t help their overall business.

The video would make a great content piece on your blog. If you don’t have a blog I strongly encourage you to consider doing so. We’ve got a great program put together with Ty Tribble called MLM Blog Secrets. You can find it here if you’re interested. https://www.mlmblogsecrets.com/

The main thing is to have a piece of internet real estate that you own and control. That’s what a blog can do for you.

Brian, let us know if you have any more questions and hope you’ll join us for your ongoing professional development.

I’ll be reading “The Talent Code” soon. It seems to emphasize what I’ve been doing in my ‘day job’ for years. I work in automotive training – training/teaching salespeople. Those skills have been honed over the years, yet I have not been able to “transfer” those skills to online or network marketing. I’ll have to reassess how I prepare and practice for working with salespeople and begin to find that new “neural” pathway for developing success online and in network marketing. I’m looking forward to the Leaders Circle!

I’m sure as you read the book you’ll find yourself nodding your head in agreement with how you learned your automotive skills. From there will be to translate those sames learning disciplines into online marketing. You’ll find them. Ignition is key to that process.

Being involved in The Leaders’ Circle is to help provide that inspiration fuel (along with deep practice and coaching along the way).

Our January Leaders’ Circle video challenge provides all those elements. I hope you’ll join in on it.